Chapter Two #2
"I can see that." Her jaw was set. The shakiness lived underneath the surface if you knew where to look: the rigid line of her shoulders, the controlled breathing, how she was standing slightly too still for a woman who hadn't stood still once during our entire exchange yesterday.
Rattled, and furious about showing it, and channeling every bit of both into the hard set of her jaw. "When?"
"Last night. Around twenty-three hundred. Two people, no running lights, headed south on the Intracoastal."
"And you know this because you were—"
"At the marina."
Her eyes narrowed. "At eleven at night."
"Couldn't sleep."
She held the look for three full seconds.
I held hers. The morning sun came through the companionway and caught the side of her face, and those honey-brown eyes went close to gold in the light.
The freckles across her nose were darker than yesterday—sunburn layering on sunburn.
Her lips were parted, slightly chapped from salt, and the heat between us had nothing to do with the temperature.
She looked exhausted and fierce, and I forgot what I'd been about to say.
"Did you get a plate number?"
"Registration number. Already running."
I called Cal from the railing and put it on speaker.
His voice came through flat and factual: the registration traced to a shell company based out of Miami.
The shell company had connections flagged in three federal databases—drug money, weapons procurement, and maritime asset recovery. The cartel kind, not the academic kind.
"The gold," Marley said, and she didn't sound scared. She sounded the way a woman sounds when she's watched two years of work become exponentially more dangerous and has already started recalculating. "They're after the gold."
"Confederate treasury reserves have significant value as a laundering asset," Cal confirmed. "Untraceable, pre-federal currency standards. If your research is accurate about the cargo—"
"My research is accurate."
"—then the wreck represents somewhere between eight and twenty million in laundering potential."
Her hand found the compass necklace, and this time she didn't catch herself. Her thumb ran over the worn silver edge while she stared at the water past my shoulder, where the morning light was shifting the channel toward pale green.
"They photographed everything," she said. "My sonar logs. My bathymetric overlays. My archival cross-references. They have my entire search grid."
"Which means they can find the wreck without you," I said.
"Not without my interpretation." Her chin came up. "The data is useless without context. A sonar anomaly at sixty-two feet could be a hundred different things. I know it's a hull because I've learned how to read this specific stretch of ocean floor."
"And now someone with cartel funding and no permit concerns has a copy of your roadmap."
"They have a copy of the directions. I'm the one who reads the language."
Something about the way she said it—absolute certainty delivered barefoot on a ransacked boat, chin up, compass in her fist—settled behind my ribs and stayed there.
Not admiration, exactly. Closer to the feeling I got watching someone hold a line they had no business holding, and holding it anyway, and being right.
She was the job. That was the frame. I needed the frame.
I turned back to the phone. "Cal. We need to talk about the scope."
CAL ARRIVED AT THE marina forty minutes later, driving the matte-black Tacoma that served as S a brief sharp protest from whatever it had been, then nothing.
I was thinking about tomorrow. I was also thinking about her. The second one was winning, and it had been winning since she'd told me where to put my paperwork.
Yeah. Knowing better and doing better were turning out to be two different things.
I rinsed the bottle and leaned against the counter in my kitchen with its blank walls and empty surfaces and a silence I'd chosen on purpose.
It had felt right for three years, the absence of complication, the clean geometry of a life kept deliberately small.
Tonight it had the feel of a room waiting for someone to walk into it carrying maps and arguments and a kind of chaos these walls had never seen.
Tomorrow at oh-five-thirty, I'd be on that dock. Sharp. Focused. Ready to do the job Cal was paying me for and nothing beyond it.
I turned off the light and went to bed.